Forcing the Spring: The Transformation of the American Environmental Movement

By Robert Gottlieb

Originally published in 1993, Forcing the Spring was quickly recognized as a seminal work in the field of environmental history. The book links the environmental movement that emerged in the 1960s to earlier movements that had not previously been defined as environmental. It was the first to consider the importance of race, ethnicity, class, and gender issues in the history and evolution of environmentalism.

This revised edition extends the groundbreaking history and analysis of Forcing the Spring into the present day. It updates the original with important new material that brings the book's themes and arguments into the 21st century, addressing topics such as: the controversy spawned by the original edition with regard to how environmentalism is, or should be, defined; new groups and movements that have formed in the past decade; change and development in the overall environmental movement from 1993 to 2004; the changing role of race, class, gender, and ethnicity in today's environmentalism; the impact of the 2004 presidential election; the emergence of "the next environmentalism."

Forcing the Spring, Revised Edition considers environmentalism as a contemporary movement focused on "where we live, work, and play," touching on such hot-button topics as globalization, food, immigration, and sprawl. The book also describes the need for a "next environmentalism" that can address current challenges, and considers the barriers and opportunities associated with this new, more expansive approach.

Forcing the Spring, Revised Edition is an important contribution for students and faculty in a wide variety of fields including history, sociology, political science, environmental studies, environmental history, and social movements. It also offers useful context and analysis for anyone concerned with environmental issues.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Island Press
• Release date: Apr 10, 2013
• ISBN: 9781597267618

Robert Gottlieb

Robert Gottlieb (1931 - 2023) was a legendary book editor and writer who shaped the modern literary canon. He was editor-in-chief of Simon and Schuster, the head of Alfred A. Knopf, and editor of The New Yorker. He contributed frequently to The New York Times Book Review, The New Yorker, and The New York Review of Books, and the New York Observer as dance critic. His books include Great Expectations: The Sons and Daughters of Charles Dickens, George Balanchine: The Ballet Maker, Sarah: The Life of Sarah Bernhardt, Avid Reader: A Life, and a collection of essays Near-Death Experiences . . . and Others. In 2015, he was presented with the Award for Distinguished Service to the Arts by the American Academy of Arts and Letters. A documentary film exploring his fifty-year relationship with the writer Robert Caro, Turn Every Page, was released in 2022.

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About Island Press

Island Press is the only nonprofit organization in the United States whose principal purpose is the publication of books on environmental issues and natural resource management. We provide solutions-oriented information to professionals, public officials, business and community leaders, and concerned citizens who are shaping responses to environmental problems.

In 2005, Island Press celebrates its twenty-first anniversary as the leading provider of timely and practical books that take a multidisciplinary approach to critical environmental concerns. Our growing list of titles reflects our commitment to bringing the best of an expanding body of literature to the environmental community throughout North America and the world.

Support for Island Press is provided by the Agua Fund, The Geraldine R. Dodge Foundation, Doris Duke Charitable Foundation, Ford Foundation, The George Gund Foundation, The William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, Kendeda Sustainability Fund of the Tides Foundation, The Henry Luce Foundation, The John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, The Curtis and Edith Munson Foundation, The New-Land Foundation, The New York Community Trust, Oak Foundation, The Overbrook Foundation, The David and Lucile Packard Foundation, The Winslow Foundation, and other generous donors.

The opinions expressed in this book are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of these foundations.

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Copyright © 2005 Robert Gottlieb

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means without permission in writing from the publisher: Island Press, 1718 Connecticut Ave., Suite 300, NW, Washington, DC 20009.

ISLAND PRESS is a trademark of The Center for Resource Economics.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication data.

Gottlieb, Robert, 1944–

Forcing the spring : the transformation of the American enviromental move-

ment / Robert Gottlieb.—Rev. and updated ed.

p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

9781597267618

1. Environmental policy—United States—History. 2. Green movement—

United States—History. I. title.

GE180.G68 2005

362.7’0525’0973—dc22

2005002445

British Cataloguing-in-Publication data available.

Printed on recycled, acid-free paper e9781597267618_i0002.jpg

Design by Brian Barth

Manufactured in the United States of America

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

To my kids:

Casey, with his love of the earth,

and Andie, with her passion for life

Table of Contents

About Island Press

Title Page

Copyright Page

Dedication

Preface to the Revised Edition

Introduction to the Revised Edition - The Next Environmentalism

Introduction

Part I - Complex Movements, Diverse Roots

Revisionist Histories

Chapter 1 - Resources and Recreation: The Limits of the Traditional Debate

Chapter 2 - Urban and Industrial Roots: Seeking to Reform the System

Chapter 3 - The Sixties Rebellion: The Search for a New Politics

Part II - The Contemporary Movements

Have the Movements Changed?

Chapter 4 - Professionalization and Institutionalization: The Mainstream Groups

Chapter 5 - Grassroots and Direct Action: Alternative Movements

Part III - Issues of Gender, Ethnicity, and Class

A White Male Upper-Class Movement?

Chapter 6 - Gender and Place: Women and Enviromentalism

Chapter 7 - Ethnicity as a Factor: The Quest for Environmental Justice

Chapter 8 - A Question of Class: The Workplace Experience

Conclusion - Environmentalism Redefined

Epilogue - From the Ground Up: Environmentalism in the George W. Bush Era—A Postscript

Afterword - A Note on Method

Notes

About the Author

Index

Island Press Board of Directors

Preface to the Revised Edition

It is now a dozen years since the first edition of Forcing the Spring was published, appearing shortly after the 1992 Presidential election and the inauguration of Bill Clinton as the forty-second president. In his inaugural speech, Clinton used the phrase forcing the spring to suggest his agenda for change. In gardening, forcing the spring evokes bringing plants to life more quickly, an earlier bloom made possible through human intervention. This possible green tilt of the new administration, as the Los Angeles Times put it, raised expectations among environmentalists that, it turned out, weren’t realized in any significant way. With the George W. Bush administration coming to power eight years later, expectations gave way to pitched battles, reminiscent of the conflicts of the Reagan years in the early 1980s, though in some ways even more protracted and bitter. As Gus Speth would later write, forcing the spring might have better served as a metaphor for the environmental crisis associated with global warming: with spring arriving earlier, while the range of species [shifted] toward the poles.¹

This period, however, has not been all bleak. Forcing the Spring came out at a point in time when the contemporary environmental justice movement was beginning to emerge as a significant force in environmentalism and as many of the large national environmental organizations sought to reposition themselves in relation to this important new dynamic in environmentalism. Forcing the Spring itself played a role in helping situate these trends by establishing a framework for analysis where race and ethnicity, class, and gender were seen as more central to the nature and evolution of the movement. It did this, in part, by reinterpreting the history of environmentalism in the twentieth century and identifying a range of historical actors and events as crucial to this history.

Forcing the Spring also helped facilitate changes that had already begun to occur in the focus and orientation of the fields of environmental history, environmental politics, and environmental sociology, as well as the analysis of environmental social movements in a number of different disciplines. These changes established an historical lineage for environmental justice that provided a greater depth and historical import for the movement. They helped frame and reinforce the arguments of many environmental activists of the need to broaden the base of the movement and have it more directly connected to issues of daily life.

When Forcing the Spring was published in 1993, some of these changes had already begun to surface. The new material in the revised edition, therefore, does not represent a radical departure from the themes and analysis of the original text, but rather extends the analysis. Nevertheless, some critical if not dramatic events have taken place in this intervening period between editions that require attention.

The revised edition seeks to accomplish two goals. It keeps intact the original text that described the roots and evolution of environmentalism; and it includes new material that takes us into the twenty-first century in rethinking the past and situating the contemporary movements. The new material includes an introductory essay that provides an analysis of the changes in environmentalism (as a movement and as a set of ideas and a type of language) in the last twelve years. It also includes new introductions to each of the three sections of the book: historical roots, contemporary movements, and issues of race, ethnicity, class and gender. And it provides an epilogue that takes us beyond the November 2004 election and updates and extends the core argument of the original text: that environmentalism is a complex set of movements with diverse roots, with the capacity to help facilitate profound social change. These complex movements have been able to survive and even grow and extend themselves, despite the trends toward globalization, military intervention, economic and social disparities, and the continuing environmental abuses that plague the contemporary order.

Introduction to the Revised Edition

The Next Environmentalism

When Sydney Howe died from lung cancer at his home in New Hampshire in 1996, he was briefly noted in a New York Times obituary as An advocate for Nature and the Poor. It went on to describe his concern for social justice and the need for an urban environmental agenda to help broaden the reach of the environmental movement.¹ Howe’s death, however, failed to receive much notice from the environmental movement. Unlike more visible figures of the late 1960s and early 1970s like Wisconsin Senator Gaylord Nelson and David Brower, Sydney Howe never gained much credit for his behind the scenes role in helping underwrite the first Earth Day in 1970. Nor was he recognized for perhaps his most notable achievement, his understanding that the environmental movement needed to stretch itself—to cross issue boundaries and embrace social justice as well as environmental protection.

Today, Sydney Howe’s insights are much more widely accepted within the environmental movement. Many of the large national and global environmental organizations like the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC) and even groups like the Audubon Society and the Sierra Club have in the past decade established some limited environmental justice and urban-oriented programs. At the same time, some key environmental justice groups such as West Harlem Environmental Action in New York City and the Environmental Health Coalition in San Diego have become important players around a wide range of issues in neighborhoods and regions. These expansive grassroots organizations have effectively crafted the kinds of partnerships that Sydney Howe advocated.

At the onset of the twenty-first century, would it be accurate to say the environmental movement has transformed itself into an advocate for nature and the poor, in the words of Howe’s obituary? Or does environmentalism remain a fragmented movement, in which the larger national groups work inside the Beltway, while the grassroots organizations remain ad hoc, single-issue organizations, with only limited influence at the national level? This question raises a host of other questions. What happened to environmentalism during the 1990s during the Clinton years and during the first four years of the George W. Bush administration? What new issues emerged for environmentalism? Which agendas and organizational patterns have changed and which have remained the same? At one time, some environmental groups functioned as mere adjuncts to the policy process. Is that still the case? Or has it become a movement capable of establishing coalitions and agendas for environmental and social change?

This new introductory essay explores the changes—and limits to change—of the environmental movement through the 1990s and the first four years of the twenty-first century. It looks at the themes, players, policy shifts, and political and organizational processes that the movement (or rather set of movements) experienced. In particular, it focuses on five key emerging arenas—the urban environment, transportation, food issues, globalization, and immigration—in which the environmental movement could stretch itself in ways that both strengthen and expand the reach of the movement. The storyline shows that capacity and opportunity for change as well as how much still needs to be accomplished if Sydney Howe’s insights are to be realized.

ENVIRONMENTAL ISSUES AND POLICIES: HAVE AGENDAS CHANGED?

In the mid- and late 1980s, the largest environmental organizations issued a series of blueprints and agenda documents, including, for example, An Environmental Agenda for the Future, produced in the mid-1980s by the CEOs of ten of the largest environmental organizations (the Group of Ten discussed in the original edition) and the Blueprint for the Environment, issued by some of those same environmental organizations in 1988.² These Agenda documents were focused on maintaining and modestly extending the environmental policy system that had been primarily crafted during the 1970s. That system had largely remained intact during the 1980s despite the fears of a possible rollback after the election of Ronald Reagan in 1980; fears that had precipitated the formation of an environmental CEO network in the first place. These 1980s agenda documents suggest in retrospect a holding action, with a few modest incremental steps that could be taken in an era of retrenchment and counterreaction.

Environmental justice groups, on the other hand, were seeking during the 1980s to establish a new environmental language and issue-based framework primarily focused on the concept of disproportionate risks. These emerging environmental justice groups and spokespeople utilized a civil rights framework, and, like the civil rights movement of the 1960s, established a more assertive, insistent tone in their pronouncements and issues and agendas. Their language of justice, empowerment, and accountability described a vision of a possible future, but was focused on righting the wrongs experienced by victimized communities. As a consequence, environmental justice groups often remained bound by the angry though still defensive language of discrimination. Although recognizing the need for a more community-oriented language of place (environment is where we live, work, and play), the environmental justice groups of the 1980s were largely unable to break out of this narrow box.

The 1990s, with its Clinton era attractions and distractions, failed to significantly shift this issue and policy framework. Initiatives to extend the environmental policy system were either limited in scope, short-lived, or quickly abandoned. An early proposal for a carbon tax, linked to an administration approach on global warming, died quickly, for example. Such efforts were even further constrained by the 1994 election when Republicans, led by their aggressive House leader, Newt Gingrich, swept into power with their Contract with America, which, for the first time since the early 1980s, appeared to challenge the environmental policy system itself. But their efforts, similar to the early Clinton administration initiatives, were also stalemated. The worst fears of environmentalists—that Republicans were seeking a mandate to roll back a quarter-century of environmental gains, as NRDC warned—were not about to occur.³

The Clinton Administration, in the meantime, was confronted with demands for equity and environmental justice from an expanding set of local groups and advocates that had gathered momentum through the early 1990s. In 1994, the administration issued Executive Order 12898, which committed the federal government to a review of any environmental policy decision that resulted in disproportionately high and adverse human health or environmental effects on minority or low-income populations. That disproportionate risk language was adopted by a number of federal agencies such as Housing and Urban Development and Transportation. By the end of the 1990s, the civil rights–type language of risk discrimination came to be widely embraced by both policymakers and environmental groups alike.

The administration’s embrace of environmental justice provided mixed benefits. On the one hand, it significantly increased the capacity of some of the more rooted community groups to address new issues and scale up their activities to the regional level beyond their initial neighborhood and single-issue focus. It also increased the environmental justice movement’s capacity when the national environmental groups or academics partnered with local groups around particular issues or concerns, such as lead paint in low-income communities or exposures from diesel trucks or buses. On the other hand, it kept the focus on risk discrimination, as opposed to community renewal or broader policy and institutional changes.

George W. Bush’s administration, prior to September 11, 2001, led to a more combative environmental movement (similar in some respects to the early 1980s). The administration immediately found itself on the defensive with respect to its early environmental pronouncements, such as its decision to lower the arsenic standard in drinking water and its opposition to the Kyoto treaty on global warming. Although some significant environmental issues were raised right after September 11 (including EPA pronouncements and the response to environmental exposures resulting from the collapse of the Twin Towers), the environmental movement, particularly the national environmental groups, saw significantly reduced interest by policymakers and the media regarding environmental questions. The War on Terror and subsequent invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq dominated political dialogue. The Bush administration was hostile toward much of the environmental policy system and was wary of the implications of environmental justice. It sought to undermine some existing programs, policies, and regulations, while reducing enforcement actions. These changes occurred often without significant media attention or Congressional scrutiny. Yet they had a significant impact on the environmental policy system, even though they seemed to be at its edges. As an article in Harper’s effectively put it, President Bush’s anti-environmental agenda has succeeded not in leaps, but in inches.⁴ By the fall of 2004, nearly all the environmental groups had decided that Bush’s defeat in the presidential election was key to their success.

Ironically, Bush had been unwilling, for political reasons, to appear to visibly challenge the environmental policy system as a whole, as former Secretary of the Interior James Watt in the early 1980s or even former House speaker Newt Gingrich in the mid-1990s had once sought to do. As a consequence, both the national and community-based environmental justice groups, while seeking to publicize the covert nature of the Bush attack against environmental protections and mandates, focused more on specific initiatives at the state and regional level as more conducive to success, given the hostility of the Bush administration. Still, this regional and statewide focus helped increase the capacity of the national environmental groups to bring about important, albeit incremental change, such as the promotion of alternative fuel vehicles or the development and substitution of nontoxic alternatives to pesticides or toxic solvents. The environmental justice groups also extended their focus from local action (as well as the Clinton era federal agency activities) to state and regional battlegrounds. This enhanced their ability to transition to a broader social justice and place-based agenda, demonstrating that environmental questions needed to become part of a larger vision of social and community change.

Even more striking than the changes among various environmental groups was the rise of new kinds of movements and issue-based coalitions that were not necessarily defined or seen as environmental as such, but who maintained a strong environmental critique as part of their core concern. This included groups mobilizing in such areas as community food security and food system changes, transportation equity and access, land use, urban infill and open space/public space development, and perhaps most notably, globalization issues. The 1999 protests in Seattle during the meetings of the World Trade Organization (WTO), for example, were remarkable for their intensity and ability to place the spotlight on globalization impacts (including but not limited to the environment). But they also reconfigured the notion of what constituted an environmental issue (and environmental group)—as well as a labor issue, a food issue, and so on.

The rise of this new type of environmental action—related to but not exclusively or even primarily defined as environmental—was already explored in the original edition of Forcing the Spring. Some critics have argued that Forcing the Spring’s recasting of the history and contemporary nature of the environmental movement effectively diluted environmentalism, and thereby diluted the meaning and power of the environmental critique. But twelve years after its publication, we’re now able to locate such terms as environment or the environmental critique, within rather than outside the struggles and debates over such issues as food, health, transportation, land use, and globalization. While the different parts of the environmental movement still seek to find their common ground, it has become clear that agendas have nevertheless changed.

URBAN PLACES: NATURE AND COMMUNITY IN THE CITY

One of the key arguments in Forcing the Spring was that the concept of place in environmental thought and action needed to include an urban component. New environmental movements emerging in the 1970s and 1980s focused on the connections between natural environments and their surrounding human communities. These areas included what was traditionally characterized as Nature or wilderness areas. But the notion that human and natural environments were inseparable, as Rachel Carson had argued more than forty years ago, could also mean that Nature had an urban face.

In the 1990s and into the twenty-first century, an urban environment movement established itself throughout the country, identifying a new kind of community-based environmentalism. This focus on community especially impacted environmental groups interested in park and open space development. Open space has long been an environmental buzzword, referring to places outside urban areas or at the urban edge where there is little or no development. Earlier open space battles sought to preserve environmental assets, such as habitat, wildlife, and other forms of biodiversity. They had not been about built environments, where there is little or no existing green space, where density is high, where contamination of the land is often extensive, and where the acquisition of land for parks or recreation seems at best only a distant possibility.

That began to change significantly in the 1990s. Environmental advocates began to redefine the open space issue as the need to reenvision community spaces and to reclaim rather than simply preserve such places. As a result, a wide variety of community and environmental groups embraced community gardens, farmers’ markets in low-income communities, relandscaping projects, and park and recreational opportunities in high-density areas.

The movement to revitalize urban rivers and streams was indicative of this change. In the mid-1980s in Los Angeles, one of the places where the urban river restoration movement first emerged, the Los Angeles River was considered a bleak, hostile place, a concrete channel fenced off from its surrounding neighborhoods. It was a river that had been straightened and (presumably) tamed, an effluent-dominated waterway or concrete freeway, as some of its flood control engineers and managers described it. But led by poet and performance artist Lewis MacAdams, a new organization, Friends of the L.A. River (FoLAR), was created. Its initial goal was simply to insist that the Los Angeles River was indeed a river. MacAdams, whose activist roots were more bound up with his identity as poet and affinity for imaginative 1960s-style protest than any specific environmental lineage, tended to attract like-minded artists, planners, architects, designers, and neighborhood activists to his 40 year art project to bring the river back to life, as he constantly proclaimed.⁵

In the late1990s, as this effort spread and made cause with other urban river renewal movements around the country, MacAdams extended his river advocacy to address issues of community change. This poet laureate of the River, as he was called, teamed up with a number of players, such as Chinatown political activist Chi Mui, who were interested in neighborhood as well as river revitalization. Along with a host of other Asian and Latino neighborhood activists, as well as environmental groups and public interest lawyers, these community and environmental advocates launched a battle against a powerful developer over a plan to develop warehouses and light industry in a large undeveloped lot adjacent to the river. The site, known as the Cornfield due to its earlier agricultural history, bridged Chinatown with other Latino neighborhoods just north and east of downtown. Employing traditional as well as unconventional strategies, the Cornfield fight (the developer eventually sold the site to the state of California to establish a new park) became emblematic of the power of this new community-environment alliance and the continuing desire to renew if not reinvent Nature in the city.⁶

As the Cornfield battle suggested, new constituencies like Latino and Asian immigrants were becoming important advocates for the development of urban parks, community gardens, and other land uses that created both community and environmental benefits. This became especially pronounced in relation to Latino neighborhoods. A poll undertaken by the Latino Issues Forum in the late 1990s, for example, indicated that 91 percent of Latinos surveyed thought environmental issues were important. However, 61 percent of those surveyed also felt that whites were the ones who made the decisions about environmental questions. Those numbers were borne out by the large majorities that Latinos (and African Americans) provided for two California state environmental bond issues that for the first time provided for some urban park development. But these same supporters did not necessarily call themselves environmentalists, a term still largely reserved for the national environmental groups. But neither for that matter did someone like Lewis MacAdams identify himself as an environmentalist, yet his affinity for community politics came directly out of his Urban Nature advocacy and vice versa.⁷

National environmental groups such as NRDC, Environmental Defense (formerly the Environmental Defense Fund), and the Audubon Society also began to embrace urban park advocacy as a basis for stretching and redefining their own agendas. Both NRDC and Environmental Defense established an environmental justice component as part of the focus in their Los Angeles (and in New York as well for NRDC) offices in the 1990s. The Audubon Society also established urban nature centers around the country, including its initiative at Debs Park in a low-income Latino neighborhood in northeast Los Angeles that was also tied to efforts to renew the park through a variety of restoration projects, hiking trails, and guided tours. In 2003, Audubon hired longtime environmental justice activist Elsa Lopez as director of the Debs Park program. Lopez, who had been executive director of one of the first environmental justice groups in Los Angeles, Madres del Este de Los Angeles Santa Isabel (Mothers of East Los Angeles), had previously volunteered in the Debs Park program due to her concern that this inner-city park had for too long been a neglected site. In her new position, Lopez sought to make accessible this slice of Nature in the city through outreach to low-income residents in the northeast and throughout the L.A. region. Inspired in part by the Debs Park project, other Audubon Society Urban Nature Center initiatives in the inner city were developed in East Palo Alto, California, Philadelphia, and Phoenix, in predominantly African-American and Latino neighborhoods.⁸

A number of environmental justice groups and advocates also came to see the importance of Urban Nature as part of a community renewal agenda that they began to embrace in the 1990s. Penny Newman, one of the environmental justice leaders profiled in Forcing the Spring, tells how her organization, the Center for Community Action and Environmental Justice, underwent a paradigm shift along these lines extending and transforming their long time environmental justice advocacy work. Since the 1970s, Newman and other members in her community of Glen Avon in Riverside County in California had been engaged in a classic risk discrimination battle related to the nearby Stringfellow Acid Pits hazardous waste site. After a long and arduous process of identifying the responsible parties and debates over what kind of clean up or remediation should occur, some funds became available for community input regarding what should happen to the land, including areas not immediately adjacent to the site. Our entire community had been impacted by what had happened at Stringfellow, Newman said of the new approach that evolved among the community participants. We knew we wanted something that would help provide a kind of rebirth, a place we could come to appreciate and feel renewed. Following a series of community meetings, the issue of a park kept coming up. A thirteen-acre site then vacant became available and a plan for hiking trails, a nature center, a community garden, and recreational activities was developed. By 2004, the community garden was operating, hiking trails had been established, and the more ambitious plans for the other park uses were close to realization. It was a very different notion of remediation for us, Newman concluded. We wanted to make the community whole.⁹

While efforts by groups to promote and mobilize around open space and Urban Nature issues mushroomed in this period, they faced enormous obstacles in many urban areas associated with scarce land, concrete-dominated landscapes, auto-centered streetscapes, and contamination problems impacting both existing and vacant sites that could potentially become available for new land uses such as parks (or schools, or housing, or commercial and industrial activity). A critical problem community groups (including environmental justice groups) faced was how to address urban land uses when potentially competing needs—for economic development, housing, and new schools, or for urban park, community garden, or recreational space development—clashed over what to do with particular sites.

One important breakthrough in efforts to overcome such divisions took place in Madison, Wisconsin, regarding twenty-six acres of open land in a working class neighborhood on the north side of the city, as well as an additional five acres of land adjacent to the site. Both community food security, environmental, and affordable housing advocates coveted the sites for a possible community garden, a community farm, nature trails, woodland and prairie restoration, and affordable housing development. Through a complex process of negotiation between a community land trust, some Urban Nature/environmental organizations, and a community food group, Friends of Troy Gardens, the different advocates sought to overcome contending agendas, distinctive ways of identifying issues and needs, and a complex political process governing the uses of the land. In addition, immigrant constituencies, including Hmong gardeners, were part of the mix of discussion, negotiation, and eventual decision-making about how to develop and manage the land. By 2004, Troy Gardens had become an integrated multiuse site, with a series of food programs (a community food garden as well as a youth garden and a functioning urban farm that served several dozen Madison residents through a subscriber-based arrangement), an environmental and educational site, and thirty affordable cohousing units. While different goals and needs had not fully disappeared, the promise of expanding rather than conflicting agendas at Troy Gardens was a viable goal for environmentalists, community food advocates, and affordable housing developers alike.¹⁰

A more cautionary example occurred in South Los Angeles when one of the first environmental justice groups in the region, Concerned Citizens for South Central, took the side of a developer against a group of immigrant Latino community gardeners. Concerned Citizens had first been formed in the mid-1980s to battle a proposed solid waste incinerator (the LANCER Project) in South Los Angeles. Successful in its effort, Concerned Citizens expanded its reach over the next two decades to address housing and community economic development issues while maintaining an interest in urban environmental questions such as waste generation and recycling. Meanwhile, the abandoned LANCER site was flourishing as an immigrant community garden (the largest in the city) linked to the nearby Los Angeles Regional Food Bank, who initially made the site available to some of the food bank’s recipients. Over time, more than 318 Latino immigrant gardeners built fences around their plots and planted trees, which in turn attracted birds and butterflies. Vines grew on chain-link fences and formed pathway canopies. As the garden evolved, it became for some a magical urban landscape. The dense foliage created a jungle-like effect that also improved the overall ambient environment. And the gardeners grew many crops only found in ethnic markets, making the garden a center of horticultural diversity.

In 2003, due to a complex history of land acquisition and transfer, a developer claimed rights to the land and proposed eliminating the garden and building a warehouse development with a small park adjacent to it. The developer enlisted the support of Concerned Citizens on the basis of the need for jobs in the community. On the other side, garden advocates, such as the Latino Urban Forum, argued that the garden not only provided an economic opportunity for the gardeners (who called themselves urban farmers) but also created a type of Urban Nature capable of renewing the otherwise bleak urban landscape. As of March 2005, the fate of the garden was caught up in litigation and remained undecided.¹¹

The Concerned Citizens/Latino immigrant farmer battle and the Troy Gardens victory are examples of the difficulties and opportunities associated with seeking to expand agendas. This has been particularly the case in urban settings where multiple players and interests vie for scarce resources while seeking to address huge needs. How these conflicts work themselves out is vital in the struggle to establish a union between community and environment.

ACCESS AND JUSTICE: TRANSPORTATION AND SPRAWL

In the summer of 1990, an informal grouping of public transportation, urban planning, public health, antisprawl, and environmental advocates came together to try to influence national (and local) transportation policy through the reauthorization of the massive federal highway bill. The timing, these advocates decided, seemed right for a possible shift in emphasis in the legislation. During the previous two decades, a number of local groups waged battles, sometimes successfully, to stop freeway construction in neighborhoods. Other community-oriented social justice groups, such as ACORN (Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now) waged battles on public transportation issues, particularly inadequate bus service in low-income communities. National environmental groups had also weighed in on transportation issues, primarily focusing on air pollution concerns, including auto-related emissions controls and fuel efficiency. For the national environmental groups, the automobile, with its polluting internal combustion engine, its sprawl-inducing freeways, and its land use–gobbling road and parking systems, was seen as a top environmental target.

Thanks to these various advocates, as well as an unusual combination of political factors, the highway bill reauthorization legislation that passed in 1991 contained, for the first time in its history, a series of provisions that sought to maintain (rather than primarily expand) existing transportation infrastructures, while also shifting significant resources to alternative transportation and environmental approaches. The name of the bill, the Intermodal Surface Transportation Efficiency Act (ISTEA), itself suggested a new direction, and its passage opened up opportunities for new programs and a new approach to transportation.

What was missing from this breakthrough, however, were equity and justice concerns, such as access, neighborhood impacts, and allocation of highway and transportation funds. These issues began to surface through the 1990s, when a wide array of grassroots organizations such as the Just Transportation Alliance of Texas, the Mississippi Equity Coalition, the Richmond (California) Improvement Association, and the Montgomery (Alabama) Transportation Coalition were organized in both rural and urban communities around the country. These groups, under the governing metaphor of just transportation, focused particularly on mobilizing low-income constituencies to advocate for a more equitable and just transportation system, a concern that was magnified with the passage of welfare reform legislation in 1996, which made transit-dependent welfare recipients especially vulnerable. Many of the community-based organizations that became involved in this network did not come directly out of environmental justice politics, but instead added environmental justice to their transportation and other community-based organizing approaches.

At the same time as social justice groups began to focus on transportation questions, environmental justice groups sought to incorporate transportation themes, particularly equity and access, into their agenda. Transportation had long been considered a core civil rights issue, symbolized by Rosa Parks’s refusal to give up her seat on a bus and the subsequent Montgomery Bus Boycott. Furthermore, Title VI of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, a key environmental justice legal tool used to block projects that increase the prevalent environmental risk discrimination in communities of color, has also been employed around many transportation projects.

In the 1990s, some environmental justice advocates, such as Robert Bullard and his Environmental Justice Resource Center at Clark University in Atlanta, made their focus on transportation a key organizing principle. When Clinton’s Executive Order 12898 was issued, the Department of Transportation (DOT), headed by Rodney Slater, an African American sympathetic to equity-based arguments, quickly embraced the order for the DOT and funded a conference designed to explore the link between transportation and environmental justice. That conference in turn produced the papers that provided the background materials for the new just transportation approach. By the second People of Color Environmental Leadership Summit in 2002, transportation equity issues were identified as a core environmental justice concern and resource papers for the Summit were commissioned that focused on such issues as transportation, sprawl, and smart growth.¹²

The journey of Carl Anthony, a longtime environmental justice leader turned foundation officer, is also noteworthy in the story of how transportation and land use issues came to figure prominently in environmental and social justice agendas in recent years. During the 1960s and 1970s, Anthony, an African American who became active in a range of community and urban social movements, saw his advocacy as an extension of his identity as a social change–oriented architecture and urban planning thinker. Originally, my focus was on certain run-down, inner-city neighborhoods, Anthony explained in a 1999 interview. These were places where you’d see miles and miles of commercial strips, but even something as simple as a place to buy decent food was missing. It struck me that although these inner-city neighborhoods were showing obvious signs of neglect, many of them were originally quite beautiful. So I was very much inspired to try to visualize alternatives. I had visions of rebuilding communities to meet the basic needs of the people who live there with parks, day care centers, and new employment centers that people could walk to.¹³

In 1989, Anthony and fellow planner Carl Linn founded Urban Habitat, an organization that sought to focus, among other issues, on inner-city land use issues such as community gardens. A community activist, planner and architect, and innovative idea person, Anthony linked environmental and social justice, urban form, regional development, sprawl, and the need to develop grassroots leadership among African Americans and other people of color. He became president of a key global environmental organization, the Earth Island Institute (founded by David Brower), which also housed Urban Habitat for nearly a decade. As a result, Anthony became a prominent environmental figure during the 1990s. In that capacity, he argued that environmental agendas needed to be simultaneously regional and inner-city based. He also argued that community-based brownfield development and equity-based transportation and regional development strategies were crucial issues for linking diverse constituencies while keeping the focus on the needs of the inner city and communities of color.

In 2001, Anthony took a position with the Ford Foundation and developed the Metropolitan Sustainable Communities Initiative, which began to fund a number of programs similar to Urban Habitat in cities and regions around the country. In 2004, he became head of the Foundation’s Resource and Conservation Development Program (which succeeded the unit that had originally funded and steered the development of the Natural Resources Defense Council and Environmental Defense Fund) and proceeded to help transform the Foundation’s environmental grantmaking. In the early 1970s, as discussed in the original edition of Forcing the Spring, the Foundation had played an important role in shaping the professional character of the large national environmental groups. Under Anthony’s direction (as well as several other program officers who had roots in environmental and social justice advocacy), the Foundation was now seeking to facilitate a change in environmentalism by linking transportation, land use, and antisprawl initiatives to an equity, justice, and inner-city empowerment agenda.

However, the difficulties faced by the just transportation and other transportation and land use–oriented advocates remained as protracted as ever during this period. At the regional level, agendas such as those promoted by Urban Habitat often required broad-based coalitions to intervene with regional government agencies that were often unresponsive to democratic participation and community input. At the national level, the resistance of entrenched highway, automobile, and construction industry interests remained significant. Advocates have, at times, been forced to narrow their goals and agendas (e.g., maintaining rather than expanding the gains established through the ISTEA and TEA-21 legislation). Even groups like the Surface Transportation Policy Project, which emerged out of the coalition of groups formed around the ISTEA legislation, felt obliged to limit attacks against the automobile to avoid being perceived as antiauto when attempting to craft the coalitions and gather the political support necessary for legislative accomplishments. In order to break through these barriers, a new type of transportation and land use politics, as well as language to frame the debate, are needed.

FOOD SYSTEMS: LOCAL AND GLOBAL

In 1992, at the time I was completing Forcing the Spring, a group of my students undertook a project to identify a new type of food politics. The project was initially conceived as an environmental justice study, identifying key community issues and strategies for change in a South Los Angeles neighborhood that had been impacted by the 1992 civil disorders in Los Angeles. After consulting with neighborhood groups and undertaking an informal survey of residents regarding the issues residents most wanted the students to address, the topic of food—especially the issue of access to fresh and affordable high quality food—kept on being raised by community members.

Is food an environmental issue, we asked ourselves, given the students’ desire to keep an environmental justice focus? During the 1960s and early 1970s, an association of alternative food advocates within the counterculture had established one type of environmental connection. Certainly, the question of how food was grown, particularly the application of industrial agricultural chemicals and fertilizers was considered a crucial environmental issue, one that was magnified by the special place that Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring held within contemporary environmental history. But the idea of food as an environmental justice or community-based issue seemed to the students more obscure.

A couple of years earlier, national environmental organizations had sought to influence the Farm Bill, legislation that was, for agribusiness interests, broadly equivalent to the Highway Bill’s importance for the highway lobby. Similar to the 1991 breakthrough with ISTEA that opened up the Highway Bill to environmental provisions, the 1990 Farm Bill included a number of environmental provisions regarding soil conservation, water quality, and other environmental impact questions that the national environmental groups had helped steer through Congress. But food issues, such as access, nutrition, price, and the overall system of production, distribution, sale, and consumption of food products, were generally absent from the agendas of both the national environmental groups and local environmental justice groups. The one significant and crucial exception was the attention given to farmworker exposure to pesticides in the fields and in their communities by environmental justice advocates.

Outside the United States, however, globalization and its impact on local, regional, and national food systems, particularly in the developing countries, had become a potent issue. The concept of a global food system, with its increasing distance between food grown (and processed) and food consumed, and its relationship to a rapidly expanding fast-food culture, became the object of criticism among a growing number of NGOs. At the same time, an emerging alternative food or local food systems approach, in both developing countries and in the United States and other industrial countries, was taking root. In the United States, it included such strategies as urban agriculture (community and school gardens), community-supported agriculture, direct marketing through farmers’ markets and food stands, and food access strategies such as van services to markets and joint ventures between community groups and food chains in inner-city communities.

My students, taking inspiration from the international movements as well as alternative food groups in the United States, decided food was a critical environmental and social justice issue (and labor and land use and health and community development issue as well), where the environmental questions could not be separated from other system-based issues such as equity, community impacts, and small farm support. Their study, along with a number of other studies at the time of local and global food systems, helped situate these new movements and strategies. The perspective this study referenced—the need to develop an alternative food systems approach—was already beginning to play a more significant role in the world of food politics and the emerging community food security advocacy groups. These groups subsequently influenced the development of new legislation as part of the 1996 Farm Bill (for example, providing for community food projects funding). It also helped stimulate and expand, during the mid- and late 1990s, the broader alternative food system approaches of a wide range of food-related groups such as antihunger advocates, sustainable agriculture and small farm advocacy groups, and the budding community food security movement.

At first, the national environmental groups maintained a cordial, though at times competitive relationship with the new food movements. During the 1995–96 Farm Bill debates, for example, environmentalists distinguished their advocacy around pesticides and other agricultural practices that had environmental impacts from the alternative food system approaches that included support for small local farmers, some of whom had not transitioned to organic farming techniques. Environmentalists often failed to take positions on such key food system trends as land and industry concentration or the growing reach of globalization in restructuring food growing and production, including the hazardous conditions of employment in the food processing sector. Nor were environmentalists focused on reduced fresh food access in inner-city communities, or the health impacts and cultural shifts due to the vast reach of fast food in communities and schools and across continents.

The demonstrations at the World Trade Organization meeting in Seattle in 1999, where food issues occupied a central role both inside the meetings and in the streets, created far more visibility for the new food movements and changed some of the dynamics among environmentalists and food activists. Subsequently, as the debates over the 2002 Farm Bill heated up, some environmental groups, such as Environmental Defense, sought to establish linkages with different food movements to save and extend environmental programs while providing support and building coalitions around other food-related issues. A growing number of approaches to food, such as community gardens, farmers’ markets, and farm to school programs, had a strong appeal as well for those who considered themselves environmentalists, even if they were not card-carrying members of environmental groups. And when the link between diet, portion size, and the prevalence of fast food and weight gain became a hot media topic, some environmental groups began to explore food choice and access as a potential area for advocacy.

Still, by 2005, food issues had yet to be fully perceived as environmental questions by most environmental groups. The new food movements, on the other hand, continued to want to incorporate but not be limited by an environmental framework. Environmental justice groups, with some exceptions, were also slow to add food issues to their organizing and advocacy, although significant equity-related connections can be identified.

There are, however, potential dividing lines on class and racial lines as well as disputes over emerging trends. Is the main objective for the new food movements, for example, to develop alternative food systems or increase low-cost food options in the inner city? The rapid increase in organic produce and related food products in the 1990s, a key environmental and sustainable agriculture goal, paralleled the growth and consolidation of whole food and health food retail outlets such as the Whole Foods chain that bought out or undercut many of the smaller, local stores. This trend also raised concerns that organics were becoming a high-priced niche market inaccessible to low-income consumers. Moreover, critics also pointed to large food companies such as General Mills and Kraft not only entering the organic food and healthy food markets, but ultimately changing its alternative or local food system orientation.

Nevertheless, by 2005, a new kind of social movement (or set of connected movements) had carved out an important place within social and environmental justice advocacy. Popular books and articles written by food industry critics and alternative food advocates such as Eric Schlosser and Michael Pollan popularized the critique of the fast food culture and global food system trends and the arguments that an alternative food system approach was not only possible but crucial from an environmental and social justice perspective. Like the transportation and land use groups, the new food movements felt the enormity of their challenge, whether in the Farm Bill debates, regarding policies on trade, or in the continuing regulatory battles over pesticide use. These challenges made it clear that instead of change in just one arena, the new food movements and their environmental counterparts ultimately needed to pursue a long march through the food chain from the farm to the fast food restaurant.

GLOBALIZATION AND IMPERIAL REACH

In 1992, the Rio Conference on Sustainable Development provided a key moment for the environmental movement to focus on the question of globalization. At the Rio Conference, the developed or northern countries (including the United States which often took the more intractable, status quo position) were pitted against the developing countries, particularly around issues of poverty, trade, and the rights of indigenous peoples. The U.S. national environmental groups, well represented at the conference, assumed the role of broker on a variety of environmental goals, some in conflict with the George H. W. Bush administration (Bush 41) objectives, but primarily as a matter of degree, and often distinct from the issues that were raised by the countries and constituencies of the South. Only a handful of environmental justice activists attended the Rio meetings, as most environmental justice groups focused on immediate community or neighborhood issues. With few exceptions (primarily Native-American groups who had begun to make cause with their counterparts in the countries of the South), they had not yet come to focus on international questions.

While Rio showed some future fault lines, the debates during the next two years over the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) further demonstrated the tensions within environmentalism. On one side, the national environmental groups such as Environmental Defense, the World Wildlife Fund, and NRDC supported NAFTA, but sought to develop assurances from the Clinton administration that environmental concerns would be addressed through side agreements to the treaty. The other side included a wide assortment of incipient antiglobalization activists (food, labor, and some social and environmental justice organizations) as well as the Sierra Club, whose membership pushed it to oppose NAFTA. These and subsequent debates intensified the growing split between the antiglobalization groups and the insider-oriented national environmental groups. The antiglobalization groups further mistrusted the environmental groups’ role in the side agreements, which the Clinton administration used to justify its proglobalization policies. This also threatened to divide some of the national environmental groups from the labor movement (which generally tended to take a sharper, more hostile stance around globalization issues) and a number of other antiglobalization forces. Their anger about the inexorable march toward a globalized world order finally reached a boiling point at the 1999 meetings of the WTO in Seattle.

The antiglobalization groups and individuals who came to demonstrate at Seattle were a disparate set of players. From the street activists, many of whom were veterans from the battles to save the Redwoods and other forest lands, to the alternative food movement activists, to a variety of other antiglobalization demonstrators, many of the protestors were environmentalists to the core, even though they also mistrusted the big environmental groups, as longtime activist and former elected official Tom Hayden put it.¹⁴ The antiglobalization activists also cut across issue and constituency lines—teamsters and turtles together at last became one of the more compelling slogans capturing the ambience of the Seattle events.

Environmental justice groups, though largely absent from the street action in Seattle and subsequent WTO gatherings (mistrustful of what they saw as a largely white movement), had nevertheless begun to get involved in the globalization debates. At the Rio conference in 1992, only a handful of environmental justice activists had participated, compared to the large turnout of environmental professionals and staff associated with the national environmental groups. Ten years later, at the World Sustainable Development conference in Johannesburg, the environmental justice activists numbered in the hundreds and both the language and issues associated with environmental justice figured prominently in several of the sessions. Similarly, at the World Conference Against Racism in Durban, South Africa, environmental justice representatives convinced conference participants to include environmental justice language in official conference documents and recommendations.¹⁵

One of the more striking examples of how environmental justice advocacy developed around globalization issues involved the San Diego, California–based Environmental Health Coalition (EHC). Similar to other environmental justice groups, EHC was formed in the early 1980s around the issue of disproportionate risks from toxics exposures in low-income communities. By the 1990s, EHC had broadened its focus and expanded its capacity to address multiple community-based environmental issues. The group also developed an organizing campaign and policy-based initiative to establish what it called toxic free neighborhoods that would not only eliminate particular hazardous facilities from a residential neighborhood but would simultaneously provide for a strong community role in any visioning or redevelopment process, including new zoning and land use policies for the community.

In the course of its organizing work in a low-income Latino neighborhood as well as its broader regional environmental focus that included the United States–Mexico border, the organization began to establish contacts with a number of groups south of the border, particularly those addressing community and worker health impacts from the maquiladora border plants run by U.S. companies. After the passage of NAFTA, EHC created a Border Environmental Justice Campaign that included both research and organizing around right to know issues, cleanup of hazardous sites, and project and policy planning and implementation. Ultimately the campaign worked toward changes to NAFTA itself, particularly around worker and community health questions. EHC’s border environmental justice activities in turn paralleled the involvement of a number of border groups, stretching from California to Texas, for whom NAFTA also became the focus for community and regional mobilization around environmental and community issues along the border.

After September 11 and particularly after the occupation of Iraq, the globalization debates took a new turn. On the one hand, the United States assumed a more direct imperial role through its military superiority (the world’s sole superpower) as well as through its extraordinary economic restructuring with the occupation of Iraq that sought to privatize the entire Iraqi economy and open it up to U.S.-based companies.¹⁶ At the same time, oil figured significantly in this geopolitical and military action, highlighting in particular the global political economy of fossil fuels, which paralleled other antiglobalization concerns. Similar to the Seattle and other anti-WTO demonstrations, these protestors, who raised environmental-oriented issues and used in part an environmental language as part of their language of protest, did so without any connection to environmental groups or allegiance to an environmental movement.

The debates over globalization and the Iraq war pointed to the opportunities—and enormous barriers—for the environmental movement and the